The children’s book author Dare Wright is billed as the inspiration for this unusual theater piece, although her name is never mentioned on stage. Actually, nothing is mentioned on stage. “Small Acts of Daring Invention” is completely wordless. For all its wordy title, it’s also hard to put into words exactly what it is. It’s sort of mime, although without Marcel Marceau’s clown makeup or graceful movements; not quite object theater, although there is a plethora of puppets; too literal to be an art installation, although the set is elaborately and inventively cluttered; too abstract to be a straightforward biographical drama, although Dare Wright’s life and work are in every moment – if you know enough about her in advance to catch on.
Born in Canada in 1914 and growing up in Cleveland, Dare Wright moved to New York to become an actress, and made her Broadway debut at the age of 21. But she switched careers, and worked as a fashion model, then switched again and became a professional fashion photographer, then expanded to become what she’s best-known for, the author of “The Lonely Doll,” a children’s book about a lonely doll named Edith and the two teddy bear friends who wind up living with her. “The Lonely Doll,” written in 1957, became a best-seller and spawned nine more books in the series, all of them illustrated with Wright’s photographs of dolls and teddy bears.
Many readers reportedly now find the books eerie and haunting. This is also an apt description of Wright’s life, according to “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright,” Jean Nathan’s biography, written a few years after Wright’s death in 2001 at the age of 86: Wright was “a great beauty, a Renaissance woman with many talents,” Nathan writes — and also a life-long virgin with unwholesomely close relationships with both her mother and brother; she withdrew after their deaths into seclusion and alcoholism.
“Small Acts of Daring Invention” is also eerie and haunting. It begins with Tracy Weller, the writer of the show and its central performer, dressed like a bag lady in an old raincoat covering an old nightgown, wandering into what looks like somebody’s long abandoned home.
Everything in the place is draped in sheets as if in mourning. Over the course of the show, five puppeteers will pop up manipulating various dolls and other inanimate objects – including an inventive puppet animal that looks a little like a moose, completely comprised of loose book pages. The woman will change clothes and put on a blonde wig, and each of the items under the sheets will be undraped one by one, revealing a large card catalogue, a bag of cat food, a camera, slide projector, a shopping cart, a cascade of buttons, a typewriter, a tree, much else.
I have little doubt that every item and every action correspond directly with Dare Wright’s life and work. But the moment I found the most fascinating, certainly the most clarifying, wasn’t because of its connection with Wright. It was when Weller as the woman had climbed up a ladder, which was being pushed by a giant teddy bear. The woman started rummaging around in the ceiling, somehow finding and extracting one unique item after the other, first a toy frog, then a ballet slipper, then a large blank book. I don’t think I’ve ever before been so conscious of the mammoth amount of work that members of the production team have to put into producing, placing and (after each performance) replacing all the objects, especially in such a show like this one, so crowded with…stuff. “Small Acts of Daring Invention” is certainly a triumph of prop-making and stage management.
Small Acts of Daring Invention
Mason Holding Theater at HERE through June 1
Running time: about 90 minutes
Tickets: $40
Written by Tracy Weller
Directed by Kristjan Thor
Puppetry by Simple Mischief Studios,
scenic design by Christopher and Justin Swader
costumes: Natalie Loveland
Lighting: Daisy Long
Projections: Yana Biryukova
Music Composition and Sound by Philip Carluzzo
Props: Patricia Marjorie
Production Manager: Mitchell Strong
Production Stage Manager: Eszter Zador
Cast: Amanda Glynn Card, Simon Catillon, Takemi Kitamura, Ariel Lauryn, Andrew Murdock, and Tracy Weller.
Photos by Maria Baranova
